A number of systems for remote electronic voting were tested in the recent years. Maximal security, which is absolutely necessary for the reliable electronic voting, has been and still is a major issue in the remote electronic voting.
Examples of such remote electronic voting can be found in several countries. Prime examples include: parliamentary elections in Australia and Estonia. Those elections were conducted successfully and can provide a solid case for implementing similar systems in other countries.
Electronic voting in Estonia began in October 2005 local elections when Estonia became the first country to have legally binding general elections using the Internet as a means of casting the vote and was declared a success by the Estonian election officials.
In September 2000, the European Commission launched the CyberVote on-line elections project with trials performed in Sweden, France, and Germany.
In Australian, the electronic voting was introduced to execute voting for military personnel stationed out of Australia, for example.
There is a Simply Voting web-based online voting system for managing online election. Voters arrive at voting website, authenticate their identity and vote. Voting results are kept anonymous. The voter is issued a receipt and is now blocked from voting for this election again.
In addition, there are several US patent references in the remote electronic voting field.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,757,950 presents election system enabling coercion-free remote voting wherein a remote voter transmits his/her selected vote to the election authority through a data transmission network such as the Internet network by using a host computer having a card reader, the vote being transmitted after the voter has introduced an identifying smart card into the card reader. At least one secret code is recorded into the smart card at the location of the election authority at the moment when the latter delivers the smart card, the secret code having to be input by the voter into the host computer when the voter wants to vote during an election in order for the vote to be transmitted to the election authority and validated by the election authority.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,597,258 by Feldkamp titled: “Confidential electronic election system” provides a system for improved elections which may separate the identity of the voter from the content of the vote she casts. The system may be implemented using electronic or other communication methods. The system is implemented in a separation of voter information from information in the members' votes, to comply with various government regulations relating to elections.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,152,156 by Babbitt titled: “Secure internet voting system with bootable disk provides” discloses an Internet voting system with security against malicious software by using a bootable CD-ROM to boot voter client machines for use in elections. The invention discloses a secure program storage device bearing program instructions operable for booting a computer by exclusive execution of program instructions found only on the storage medium at the computer and the exclusive execution of program instructions excepting system device drivers as needed for operation of the computer; the program instructions on the storage medium being further operable for execution of a voting application program configured to permit a voter to cast votes in an election.
The currently presented electronic voting systems, as well as other currently existing encryption methods, such as SSL do not provide fully encrypted data in the database, therefore network and database administrators will be able to view the data. Our invention presents a system wherein the data in the voting database is encrypted, so to prevent network and database administrators from viewing the data. Further, a new method of secure encryption is disclosed in our invention.
One additional problem in current voting process is a situation of “double voting”. An example of “double voting” is when Democrats in USA are voting for a certain Republican candidates for primaries in addition to voting in the Democratic primary.
To fix this problem, in our invention, the preferences would flow down the list of the candidates of the party they first chose and then move on to the list of candidates of the party of their second choice, and so on.
One additional advantage of the invention is in eliminating the need in all sort of election polls which are normally conducted before the elections results become public in a few hours time after election time period is ended.